


only a feeble notion, a glimmer from afar

by paperiuni



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Character Study, Drama, Gen, Geth, Missing Scene, Quarians, Rannoch, ficadayinmay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:13:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1565900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Rannoch, Tali makes an adjustment or two. There's no map to make her course by, but she must chart it all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	only a feeble notion, a glimmer from afar

The thunder and fire of the orbital bombardment die for the fourth--fifth--time, but this time the roar of the Reaper Destroyer's cannon does not start again. The geth craft hovers, all of its three passengers fixated upon the hill where Shepard insisted on staying.

"Go back," Tali breathes before Garrus can get out more than a, "That sounds pretty final."

"We still detect an energy signature from the Destroyer, Creator Tali'Zorah."

"Legion." She leans forward from the back seat--storage compartment, whatever it is. "We _have_ to go back. This--you know this isn't over."

Legion is quiet for an instant that counts as an appreciable moment of deliberation. "Acknowledged. You judge the hazard to personal safety acceptable."

"Yeah," Garrus joins in. "You're lucky I let you drive off at all while she stayed back to play Reaper tag armed with a handgun."

"We would remind Garrus Vakarian that the 'handgun' is a highly advanced targeting laser."

Does she imagine it, or is that a snap of sarcasm in Legion's words? "Oh, _keelah_ ," she says. "Will you _please_ drive before I try my luck at cross-country sprinting?"

Garrus laughs, a rumbling show of mirth against the gravity of the situation. She spares him a grateful glance as Legion spins the vehicle around towards the jagged hillock.

* * *

The next time Tali feels like she has managed to draw a full breath, the world has changed. In ones and twos, geth platforms emerge from the shadows of the Reaper base, the contours of the landscape.

She closes the electromagnetic locks on her suit visor, and the smells of arid desert air, the blooming of some brush she will have to look up in a historical herbarium, swirl in the helmet for a last brief moment. Shepard waits a few steps away. She cast a curious glance or two at Tali's face, then left her to her moment.

One day, Tali will share that moment. Out of necessity it is a brief one. Her helmet comms are muted save for the squad channel, but she can only imagine the buzz of information rushing and surging across the Flotilla.

Rannoch is won. The battle is done. The geth have, however many of her people will believe it, made an offer of peace.

The homeworld is theirs. Theirs to share.

"I should get back to the Normandy," Shepard is saying. In the violet evening sky, the Kodiak's thrusters flash blue as it approaches. "I have to report this to Hackett before some other enterprising body does it for me."

"Worried we work too hard?" Garrus comes up the hill, having hailed the shuttle. "You set the bar pretty damn high, _Commander_."

"No," Shepard huffs. "More just that some idiot is recording this homecoming on an omni-tool, and the vid will hit the extranet any hour now."

Tali's exhalation becomes half a chuckle. "Could you blame them, Shepard? I know why you did it--but you also did it for seventeen million of my people. You gave them Rannoch."

"With some help." Shepard's voice gentles on the words. "I'm guessing you want to stay planetside for now."

Garrus make a soft, nonverbal noise, the thrum of it suggesting a question. "You're not..."

Despite the countless concerns racing in her mind, Tali makes herself slow down and focus. If Shepard assumed so, when they spoke in the aftermath, why wouldn't Garrus?

"Just for a while," she amends. "We'll have the first ships landing today. There's no helping it."

If you didn't know him well, you might miss the way he relaxes. His voice has an edge of teasing. "See you shipside then, when your adoring public can spare you."

"As if it's me they're coming to see!" she snaps. He already turns away, a hand raised in a wave. "He's insufferable."

"Tell me about it." Shepard squeezes her shoulder, a sure, solid grip through the layers of suit. "I should go, too. You look after your people."

"I will." Mask or no mask, she trusts Shepard will catch her smile.

* * *

_You look after your people._

This is where she must be now, with her people as they set foot upon Rannoch. The Admiralty Board doesn't even attempt to bar the flooding down of every transport capable of atmospheric flight. As it is, they manage a degree of control, establishing landing zones and hastily erected facilities. As disciplined as the quarians are, as used to hardship and limitation, this buoyant euphoria seems to seize the better part of them.

The presence of the geth dissuades several, but those appear fewer in number than she might have guessed. The geth, too, gather on the peninsula that now becomes the bridgehead of the quarian landing on Rannoch. A river delta cuts across the southern side, providing a source of fresh water, and the hills to the north cup around the delta in a sheltering wall. The environment is a relatively clement one.

Tali takes over coordinating the landings, working on a jury-rigged list to see that the ships are set down in a sensible manner. Even in the haze of work, she finds herself stopping now and then. The evening seeps into a temperate night, the night chill gentler this close to the ocean, but quarians, as mostly nocturnal creatures, do not mind the darkness. They gather in groups on the fringes of the impromptu landing zone to point out the glittering constellations, taught to every quarian child but seen only by the geth for over three centuries.

This is Rannoch, Rannoch, the fable and the faith. This is the homeworld that became the cornerstone of their nomad existence, the true ending point of the Pilgrimage of their people through the stars. Rannoch and all its names.

Then her omni-tool blinks with another message or another face comes up to her with a query, and she returns to her duties. She moves through the night hours, heeding the first arrivals, organising and filing and pointing. People at least return to their ships to sleep, though temporary shelters on the ground will only be a matter of time.

When a hulking shadow falls across her, she starts, balking backwards from the Prime, its red shell soaked black in the starlight.

"I'm sorry," she says at once, breathing in to center herself. "Is there something..."

_Something I can help with?_ is not a question that resonates with speaking to a geth. They are there, making their straightforward way among the clusters of arriving quarians. She remembers Shepard taking her aside after they'd disabled the geth server on Rannoch, and telling her, in low grave tones, that the geth were tending the planet, keeping a silent stewardship over the homeworld, if the quarians were to return one day.

That humbled her, in ways she cannot now express to anyone who should hear it.

_How do they even do that?_ There is no spite, no recrimination, no vengeance in the geth. Her people have no idea. The war is over, and it seems that in the mind of the geth that is the end of it. Nothing more needs to be said.

It cannot be that simple.

"I observe you are not working at peak capacity, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy." The "Creator" at least is gone. She can't help but feel the title as a painful pressure in her chest. _We made you, and we turned on you, and now you are our salvation._ "You require rest."

She looks up at the ten-foot platform and its three unblinking optic lights, and somehow her unease dissolves into weary, breathy merriment. "It is pretty late, isn't it?"

"The day will change in three minutes and twenty-two seconds," the Prime continues. "Our understanding of the Creator circadian rhythm suggests that you should be sleeping."

Generally her people sleep for the darkest part of the night and the brightest part of the day, a rhythm preserved even on the Flotilla.

"I'll... find a berth somewhere," she chuckles. The _Normandy_ is in orbit, and so is the _Neema_ , both ships too large to easily land on a planet with Rannoch's magnitude of gravity.

"If you will come with me, arrangements have been made to accommodate you."

Shaking her head, Tali shuts down her omni-tool and realises that yes, bereft of the steady glow of the interface, her eyes are ready to droop shut. The Prime's footfalls raise a steady row of dust puffs into the air as they weave between the sleeping ships. On the roof of one, she can hear a medley of quarian voices, trying and failing to whisper.

"Do you..." She looks away, then back at the Prime. The geth do not hesitate; perhaps she owes it to them to speak candidly. "Do you have a name?"

"I have a numerical designation," the Prime says, its tone unchanging. "But while it is a good signifier to the geth, observation suggests organics might find it does not acceptably correspond to a 'name'."

"Well." She cants her head. "That's probably true. We tend to be better with language than with math. To ignore for the moment that they have a lot in common."

"The fact that individuals might share the same name causes you no confusion?" That seems to be a question.

So how would she explain organic nomenclature to a being of logic and software? The significance that a ship name carries? She reels herself back before her thoughts can run too free. "Not usually? Even if it does, we have ways around that. One of those people might go by a nickname. As long as it's clear who we mean when we discuss someone, it works."

"Understood." The Prime halts at the corner of a landed transport. The back hatch of the ship has been left in a half-open position. "Your Civilian Fleet has made accommodations in the storage areas of several of their transports, for those whose home ship is not here."

"Thanks." She fidgets: half of her brain is sinking towards the promise of sleep, but the other is busy picking at this mystifying, unprecedented conversation.

"Tali'Zorah?" Her eye turns upwards as the Prime speaks again. "You played a role in the peacemaking between the geth and the Creators that must not be overlooked. The consensus knows of your efforts, even before the Old Machines came."

"I..." She chokes on the rest of the sentence, whatever she was about to say. _Knows of my efforts?_ Her efforts indeed. How little she has done. How late it was until she was ready to trust.

"You were the link to which Legion connected." She doesn't dare look away, and, towering over her, the Prime seems to hold her gaze in return. "It took on a name, like one of the organics. Perhaps the geth will now have names both for their own use and that of the organics."

Oh, she hates crying in the suit, but the tears do not heed her comfort. Her eyes burn and well over, and the Prime blurs in her vision.

"Maybe," she manages. "That... that would be a help to our memories."

"Then we shall consider the matter, and build a consensus."

* * *

When she sleeps--rather later in the small hours--she dozes off on a side bench in the loading bay of a transport, thankful for the helmet cushion that saves her neck from the worst of cricks. Up again before dawn, she eats a hasty breakfast in the mess of the same transport, proper Fleet food after the processed and sterilised goop she mostly has on the _Normandy_. Then she is out in the coral-red pre-dawn to guide and settle and start disputes of her own.

So it goes, an incredible, merry whirlwind, for all of that day and well into the next. In increments, the geth begin appearing among the quarian crowds, approached by the brave and the curious. For now there lingers a hush around her people, a mixture of wonder and apprehension, as the platforms move into and among the beginnings of the settlement. It will not last, but whatever it shapes into is yet a question for the future.

One of an untold plenty of others, Tali reminds herself on occasion. Let it come, moment by moment.

It is an opportunity dearly bought. They had best not squander it.

Her omni-tool pings with the seventh message in half an hour, and she excuses herself from a small cadre of junior officers in the Patrol Fleet to take it. It might wait, but the sender ID is from the _Normandy_.

EDI's cool, enunciated voice echoes from the speaker. " _Hello, Tali. I have been informed that you plan to rejoin the_ Normandy _. Please inform me of your schedule at your earliest convenience._ "

Her earliest convenience may not come for days, if the sheer hustle and bustle is anything to go by. The military vessels of the Flotilla are up in space, hunting the last of the Reaper forces to secure the Tikkun system. But the better part of their civilian population must be settled on Rannoch before they can leave. The _Normandy_ is unlikely to wait that long.

Once the Patrol officers have what they need, she ducks between a couple of transports and gives herself a moment to think. The high sun pierces the shade of her hiding spot in a single sharp line of light.

She did tell Shepard, did tell Garrus, that she would come back. That the pull of the homeworld would not keep her from the ship that is in her name. Tali'Zorah, child of the _Rayya_ , crew of the _Neema_ , kin to the _Normandy_. While the quarians return from their long wandering, her family is scattered across worlds and species.

For some time, she stares up at the wonder of Rannoch sky above. Then she goes to find out when the next transport is leaving for the part of the Flotilla waiting in orbit.

Her possessions are quickly gathered from her cubbyhole of a room on the _Neema_. Being an admiral brought her a few perks, but she's a young quarian without a steady partner. A private space was all she felt justified in asking. There is so little room on the ships--and now, the entire planet rests far beneath her feet, as if she had only now found a fixed point to steer by.

_That isn't right_ , she thinks as soon as the first thought comes to her.

No great ceremony accompanies her leaving. She touches hands with a few colleagues in the promise of a reunion, salutes Captain Kar'Danna vas Rayya when she happens across him in the hangar, and then embraces him, feeling her eyes mist again. She leaves a message of farewell to Shala'Raan, and then, finally sends another to EDI. It is brief, but she feels like no more is needed:

_I'm on the_ Neema _and would appreciate a pickup when you can spare the shuttle. I'm ready to come home._

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Spell" by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.


End file.
